Loverly:The Life and Times of My Fair Lady (Broadway Legacies)

by McHugh, Dominic

  5

  SETTLING THE SCORE

  PART I

  Of the songs that eventually made it into the score of My Fair Lady, only “The Rain in Spain” and “Show Me” were left more or less as they were originally conceived by Lerner and Loewe, and only a couple of changes were made to the lyric of “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly?”1 All the other numbers went through a considerable amount of revision and recomposition, with “Why Can’t the English?” particularly notable for the existence of four completely different versions in the Library of Congress’s collections. This chapter approaches the show’s musical numbers through the numerous types of compositional manuscripts identified in chapter 4. Such a process helps reexamine Lerner and Loewe’s approach to the show as well as the relationships between the different members of the “music department”: the orchestrators (Robert Russell Bennett, Phil Lang, and Jack Mason), dance arranger (Trude Rittmann), choral arranger (Gino Smart), and various copyists. More generally, this gives an insight into the complexities of the processes that went into producing the music for Broadway shows of the period as well as a critical examination of various aspects of the definitive published text.

  SETTING THE SCENE: CREATING THE OVERTURE AND OPENING

  Although it was standard procedure on Broadway for orchestrators and arrangers to create the overture for a show based on themes from the main songs, Frederick Loewe seems to have played a more active role than this in the creation of the Overture for Fair Lady. A two-page autograph piano score from the Library of Congress’s Loewe Collection shows that Loewe drafted out the opening statement, the theme from “You Did It” and the transition into “On the Street Where You Live” (only the first bar of which is included).2 At the top of the first page, Loewe wrote an instruction to Trude Rittmann—who arranged the show’s incidental music in addition to the dances—to “Have [Robert] Russell [Bennett] confirm keys.” This highlights an unambiguous chain of command from composer (Loewe) to arranger (Rittmann) to orchestrator (Bennett). In addition, Loewe stated that the music should continue into a refrain of “On the Street” and “I Could Have Danced,” showing how the rest of the Overture was to be filled out, and underneath this he indicated the suggested key scheme that he wanted Bennett to confirm: “‘Street in C’, ‘Danced’ in E-flat, into ‘Opening’ in C.” Some of Loewe’s articulation and dynamics were retained in the published vocal score, but basically these two pages are a set of instructions to be handed down the line to Rittmann, who then wrote out a full-length, six-page piano score.

  Rittmann’s score (in the Warner-Chappell Collection) reveals her contribution to the composition. Although her score is based on Loewe’s, Rittmann modified the voicing or in some cases some of the counterpoint to make it less pianistic and more appropriate for the purposes of orchestration. She mapped out the entire number for Bennett, though she used shorthand to indicate where the full refrains of “On the Street” and “I Could Have Danced” were to be played. Evidently she had two attempts at creating the transition music between these two themes; the first is crossed out and an arrow points toward the replacement. Her two-bar introduction to “I Could Have Danced” (bars 118–119) is also unfamiliar, consisting of a simple vamp rather than the more smoothly forward-driving published version. Also, the sixth-to-last bar of the overture appears as an ascending scale from B flat to B flat (the dominant of the key of the passage). This was later changed to a scale of ascending minor-seventh chords with a different destination chord, but in every other respect Rittmann’s score matches the published piano-vocal scores.

  Clearly, it was the basis for Bennett’s full score of the number, because bars 118 and 119 were amended in Bennett’s score, with a new strip of manuscript paper stuck on top of the orchestration of Rittmann’s version of these two bars. Bars 134–135 were amended using the same procedure. Because Rittmann simply copied out a few bars of the melody and then wrote “etc. full chorus of I Could have danced,” Bennett was given no new material to increase the interest of this section and therefore orchestrated the bare song as it appears in its sung version in the show. The revision adds chromatic movement to fill in the spaces between phrases more inventively. It is impossible to know who decided that an improvement needed to be made, but it is likely that Loewe examined the score and highlighted areas for improvement such as this (not least because Bennett or Rittmann could have written them in this way in the first place).

  The autograph full scores for the Overture and Opening Scene are physically bound together as if they were a single number, and the published vocal scores both list them as a single number. But though the music runs without closure from one to the other, clearly they are two separate pieces of music with disparate functions. The Overture is a conventional medley of key themes from the show, bringing the audience to attention with a fanfare; the Opening Music is mimetic and provides both a background to and an illustration of the events going on as the curtain goes up on Covent Garden market. Although George J. Ferencz implies that Bennett orchestrated both pieces, the autograph score indicates that Phil Lang was responsible for the Opening Music.3 There is no known Loewe autograph piano score for the piece, so it is likely that Rittmann was responsible for its composition: a complete piano score in her hand has survived, and that it contains both amendments and some unfamiliar elements—suggesting an initial composition that has then been modified and improved (possibly after Loewe’s intervention)–promotes her authorship. One such instance happens in bars 17–20, where Rittmann has bracketed 17–18 and 19–20 into two groups of two bars, with each group to be repeated; in the published version each is heard only once. The “Tempo di Soft Shoe” section is also twice as long in Rittmann’s version—sixteen bars as opposed to eight—and it is striking that she had an additional two bars at the end, again with repeat signs around them (allowing some extra time to improvise while Eliza appeared onstage), but then struck them out to create the now-familiar version, which has a sense of interruption about it.

  With the exception of the latter amendment (which Rittmann must have made before handing it over), the full score shows that Lang orchestrated Rittmann’s score, and later modified it. Again, most of the revisions were made by pasting new strips of manuscript paper over the old bars. The repeat signs in bars 17–20 were scribbled out in pencil and “no repeats” written over the bars. At bar 48, she indicated with an arrow, “Phil, from here on different fill in,” and in response Lang reassigned the melody from the clarinet to the flute, oboe, and violins, also fleshing out the harp and trumpet parts, and adding trombones. The ruthless editing of some passages again suggests that Loewe may have helped shape the piece, even if he did not write out the score.

  Regardless of authorship, the Overture and Opening are breathtakingly crafted. The four-bar call to attention at the beginning of the Overture is followed by a snippet of “You Did It”; the procedure is repeated, but this time the theme from the song is extended to lead into a complete refrain of “On the Street Where You Live.” A two-bar reference to the servants’ counterpoint in “I Could Have Danced All Night” (“It’s after three, now, / Don’t you agree now”) leads into a chorus of that number, interrupted at the end by another brass fanfare that segues into the Opening. The Overture is traditional in the sense that it contains a medley of potential “hits,” but at barely three minutes’ duration it is also relatively short for a show so rich in melodic invention. Evidently, Loewe wanted to push straight into the action. The Opening music is also succinct. There are three main sections: the first, in which “Crowds are milling about Covent Garden Opera House”; the second, a dainty “Tempo di Soft Shoe”; and the furious third, in which the music whips into a frenzy before being interrupted by Eliza’s cry of “Aoooow!” on being knocked over by Freddy. The music for this brief piece is wonderfully free and harmonically complex, but its most obvious point of interest is in the reference to the English nursery rhyme “London Bridge Is Falling Down,” which contains the line “my
fair lady.” Rittmann and Loewe include the music that goes with this line as a sneaky reference to the show’s title. Since the musical was named only in late December 1955 (see chap. 2), the Opening music almost certainly has a late date of composition, probably during the rehearsal period, which would explain why no manuscript exists in Loewe’s hand.

  ELIZA’S DREAMS, ELIZA’S RAGE

  Eliza’s five solo songs fall into two main groups: those that express her anger (“Just You Wait,” “Show Me,” and “Without You”) and those that express her joy or aspirations (“Wouldn’t It Be Loverly?” and “I Could Have Danced All Night”). She is prone to extremes of emotion, be it elation or fury, rather than a “middle ground” position. Nor do these songs particularly convey facts to the audience. That is not to say that they tell us nothing, but rather that they are more about expression and characterization than explanation. This is especially the case with “Wouldn’t it Be Lovely.” In addition to the published vocal scores, there are two slightly different lyric sheets for the song, Loewe’s autograph, a copyist’s piano-vocal score, and Bennett’s full score. Clearly, the song came easily to Lerner and Loewe—the lyricist describes how a visit to Covent Garden market in the early morning provided the inspiration for the lyric, which Loewe set to music “in one afternoon”4—and the sources all suggest that the song changed very little during the creative process.

  Nevertheless, some ambiguities remain. The first lyric sheet (from Levin’s papers) consists of the refrain with just three deviations from the familiar version: “With one gigantic [instead of ‘enormous’] chair,” “Lots of fire [instead of ‘coal’],” and “Crept over the winder sill” instead of “Crept over me winder sill.”5 The second lyric sheet (from the Warner-Chappell Collection) includes the verse and changes the refrain into its final version, with the exception of “gigantic/enormous.”6 Evidently this version was used to prepare the copyist’s score in the Warner-Chappell Collection. A copy intended for Bennett is annotated throughout to show how the basic score—containing the verse and one refrain in F major—was to be developed into the whole number with dance music. Bennett’s orchestral chart is almost entirely free of blemishes or corrections: the only real modification to the orchestration involves the removal of the bassoon and clarinet parts in bars 66–69 (“Lots of choc’late for me to eat…,” second refrain).

  The copy of the song in the Loewe Collection, however, is confusing. It contains the verse and one refrain, with indications for two repeats of the refrain; there are also some crossed-out bars. This would seem to identify it as an early version of the song that was passed on to the copyist and orchestrator.7 However, it is difficult to account for the fact that this supposedly “original” composer score uses almost the final version of the lyric: of the three instances of the “pre-improvement” lyric listed earlier, only “Crept over the winder sill” (as opposed to “over me”) is present here. None of this affects the authorship of the song, yet it suggests that this is not Loewe’s original manuscript but rather a fair copy for the use of others. This is the case with many of the piano-vocal scores in the composer’s handwriting held in the Loewe Collection that tend not to represent the actual pieces of paper on which the songs were first written. Like Richard Rodgers (more of whose sketches have survived), it seems that Loewe went about drafting his songs on a single stave before writing out a fuller piano-vocal score.8 This serves as a reminder that placing too much importance on one source, instead of taking a larger sample and putting them into a wider context, can lead to a misunderstanding of the compositional process.

  Even though “Wouldn’t it be Loverly?” has a simplicity that is appropriate for its dramatic context, it is nevertheless full of interesting features. The verse begins with four arpeggiated chords to punctuate Eliza’s delighted cries of “Aooow!” upon being given the money by Higgins: a seamless way for the music to segue out of the scene. This leads to the introduction, with its lazily descending melodic turns. But Loewe cuts it short with a perfect cadence as the men break into their “Quasi recitativo” a cappella verse, in which they describe their dreams. The “false” introduction then returns and drives into Eliza’s F-major refrain. The latter’s outward cockney charm belies its complex harmonization and chromaticism. For instance, bar 21 (“room somewhere”) moves into the subdominant area, establishing the song’s warmth, but although bar 23 (“cold night air”) ends on the expected dominant-seventh chord, it does so via an abrupt G-major seventh at the start of the bar. Perhaps the most elegant feature is the use of contrary motion in bars 24–25 (“With one enormous chair”), whose appoggiaturas come into their own when the pattern recurs in 27–28 to accent the repetition in the phrase “Warm face, warm hands, warm feet” (ex. 5.1). The bridge section (“Oh, so loverly sittin’ absobloomin’lutely still”) also has a fast harmonic rhythm, again featuring examples of chromatic voice-leading, while the final section is extended beyond its expected eight bars because of a prolongation of the title phrase. The second refrain features four-part choral writing alongside Eliza’s line, followed by a brief dance section in A-flat major in which the men whistle the melody. The number ends as Eliza sings a final “Oh, wouldn’t it be loverly?” to which the men respond by repeating the final word. What Loewe achieves in this song is an introduction to Eliza’s softer side and the camaraderie of the Covent Garden workers while maintaining a richness of texture. Lerner’s idiomatic lyric plays its part in establishing the social class of the characters, but so too does Loewe’s melody. Its harmonization, however, is comparatively ornate, taking the song far beyond its broad allusion to the jauntiness of the English musical hall.

  The same goes for “Just You Wait,” Eliza’s next song. It features a strong martial aspect, depicting Eliza’s fury at Higgins’s sadistic treatment of her, and the freedom of form Loewe uses in the number is equally striking. After the opening refrain in C minor, Loewe writes an episode in D-flat major in which Eliza dreams of fame and fortune. She imagines gaining the king’s attention and requesting that Higgins be beheaded. A transition in B-flat major (“‘Done,’ says the King…”) leads back into the opening material. This time it is rendered in C major, and the music portrays Higgins’s march to the firing line (“Then they’ll march you, ’enry ’iggins, to the wall”). Therefore, while the opening passage has the overall trappings of the 32-bar song (abbreviated to 30 due to the melodic diminution of the return of the A section at the end), the number as a whole also follows a similar form in macrocosm, namely a long opening section in which the character lays out her position, a contrasting section about three-quarters of the way through, and a return to the opening material. Also, in spite of its modal contrast to the opening section, the D-flat major passage retains its links to the main “Just you wait” theme by starting each phrase with a similar three-note ascending pick-up (“One day,” “One eve[ning],” “All the peo[ple]” and so on). Along with the ominously understated fermatas when Eliza declares she wants Higgins’s head and the jubilant trumpet line when the king gives his order, this is one of several aspects of the number that show how Lerner and Loewe make even a short song into a complex musical scene.

  Ex. 5.1. “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly?” bars 27–28.

  Lerner states that “Just You Wait” was one of the first songs he tackled with Loewe, and names it as one of those that he played for Mary Martin during their first meeting about the show.9 This is supported by Outline 1 (chap. 3), in which “Just You Wait” is one of the few songs referred to by title; Eliza sings it in the upstairs bathroom, “wet and shaking like a drowned rat.” By Outline 3, a montage of lessons has been introduced, but the song is not explicitly referred to. Only Outline 4 confirms its final position: it takes place in Higgins’s study and is the “Second Song” after a first “Song: Montage of lessons” (surely “The Servants’ Chorus”). At this stage “Just You Wait” was to be preceded by a refrain of “The Servants’ Chorus,” but in the published show Eliza’s song comes firs
t, allowing her to vent her frustration before the servants illustrate the passage of time during the lessons. The rehearsal script shows an intermediate structure: “Just You Wait” is immediately followed by a blackout, a verse of the servants’ song, another blackout, then the lesson about “The rain in Spain.” The published script, however, misses out this instance of the “Chorus” and goes straight to the lesson.

  This illustrates how Lerner and Loewe operated on both the local and the broader level. Originally, the song allowed Eliza to express her humiliation at being stripped of her clothes, forced to have a bath, and compelled to wear Higgins’s bathrobe. But by changing it to express Eliza’s frustration about her lessons rather than about being treated inhumanely, Lerner softened the dislikeable part of Higgins’s personality. “Just You Wait” isolates the tension between the two so that it tells of a discouraged pupil who does not know how to fulfill the expectations of a perturbed teacher, who in turn does not know how to give his student what she needs. Language, not misogyny, is the subject of the song, even though the lyric is outwardly a hyperbolic description of Eliza’s imagined retribution.

  The lyric underwent one major change and one minor alteration. The major change involved the complete recasting of the third and fourth verses, which were originally as follows:

  Oooooo …’enry ’iggins!

  Have your fun but ’enry ’iggins you beware.